I haven't read through the whole topic (forgive my laziness), but has it come up that mistborn would make a pretty sweet MUD? I don't play them too much, but I can't see a graphical game really doing it justice because of the limitations, whereas a MUD is a bit more free to do what it will.
I don't like MUDS. But the browser based form to start with that I was talking about is SIMILAR to MUDs but just puts a picture on a map for you so you actually know where you are.
As far as 3D. Anything is possible if you have the programmers and the people playing have the disc space and RAM.
yes, but graphical is more limited in and of it takes more man hours and more work to do increasingly complex things, as opposed to a MUD, which takes a little imagination to put words into text, and some simple case statements.
I've made games, both texty and graphically (nothing to write home about, but was fun to dink around with in college.) and find from experience that graphical games require much more work the more you want to do. Personally, I'm not a big fan of MUDs either, but I don't think anything 3D could capture to full of mistborn very easily. (as an FYI, I'm not a PROFFESIONAL game designer, though that would be awesome. I'm just a regular software engineer, so i know how to program, it's just that game programming requires alot ALOT more work into it than, say, a finiancial program.)
Obviously anything is possible if you put your mind to it when making something, as long as you have the skill and imagination to do so, it's just that the more complex you get, the less feesible it becomes because of the increase to workload.